A soft knock cuts through the dark.
My eyes find the clock — 12:47 — and my pulse answers before my brain gets a vote. One person in this house knocks like that. Quiet, almost apologetic, like he's giving the door a chance to talk him out of it.
I cross the room barefoot. The floorboards creak in the sequence I've known since childhood — third board, fifth board, the one by the dresser that groans no matter where you step. I open the door.
Dominic stands in the hallway looking like a man who lost a fight with his own ceiling. T-shirt wrinkled, sweatpants low, bare feet on the hardwood. His hair points in directions that suggest he's been dragging his hands through it for the past two hours. Which makes two of us, except I've been more discreet about my insomnia.
"Couldn't sleep." His voice is rough. "Saw your light."
"It's almost one in the morning, Dominic."
"I'm aware."
I should close this door. Every survival instinct I've built over seven years is screaming that nothing good comes from letting a man who looks like that into a bedroom at midnight. This is the part of the movie where the audience yells at the screen.
I step back and let him in.
He takes the edge of my bed like it's the most natural seat in the house. I fold myself into the chair by the window, pulling my knees up — a full six feet of distance between us that my body is already working to close without my permission.
"Checked on Elliot an hour ago." He rubs the back of his neck. "Snoring like a freight train."
"He gets that from my mother." The words come out before the ache can catch them. "Used to drive Vivian insane."
"Vivian snored worse." That ghost-smile — the one that cracks his face open for half a second before he catches it. "She'd deny it to her grave, but I could hear her through two walls. Like a lawnmower wrapped in a silk pillowcase."
The laugh escapes me. His follows — low, surprised, and the room shifts on its axis. The air loses its charge, trades it for something I haven't felt in this house since before the will reading. Ease.
The silence that settles isn't hostile. It's the other kind — the kind that fills with everything you're not saying and somehow holds the weight.
"Can I ask you something?" The question leaves my mouth before I clear it for departure.
He nods.
"What happened to you?" I rest my chin on my knees. "You built a company from nothing. Forbes profiles, acquisitions, that reputation where people said your name like it meant something. And now you're sitting on my childhood bed at one in the morning, broke, hiding in your grandmother's house." I hold his gaze. "Where did it go, Dominic?"
The clock ticks. The house shifts its bones in that way old houses do when they're listening.
"Victoria." The name drops between us like something heavy hitting water.
"I met her two years after I left here. After I left you." His hands find each other, fingers locking, knuckles going pale. "She was smart. Connected. Knew my industry better than I did, and she looked at me like I was the version of myself I wanted to be." He swallows. "I thought — this is what you do when you've ruined the real thing. You find the convincing imitation and you commit."
I don't move. Don't breathe too loud.
"So I married her. Built the company with her name on half the paperwork because she said trust means shared risk." His jaw works. "Turns out shared risk means she gets the infrastructure when she leaves. The contacts. The clients. The reputation I spent six years constructing, dismantled in a ninety-day divorce where her lawyers knew exactly where every wire was buried. Because she'd been mapping the exits since the honeymoon."
"Dominic —"
"I kept thinking about you." He cuts across me, and his voice has that cracked quality of a man who knows if he stops he won't start again. "The whole time. Even standing at the altar. Even in the boardroom when Victoria was rewriting contracts to gut me. I'd lie there at three in the morning doing the math — how old you'd be. Whether you'd finished your degree. Whether you hated me enough to forget me entirely or just enough to remember."
My throat closes around something with sharp edges.
"When I saw you at the will reading —" He looks at me and those mismatched eyes hold nothing but the thing underneath everything else. The thing he's been burying under cruelty and charm and cashmere sweaters that cost more than my car. "Standing there in that black dress, looking at me like you wanted to set me on fire. I knew."
"Knew what?"
"That I'd been running from the only person who ever saw me. And she was still here. Still standing in the house I abandoned." His voice drops. "Still too stubborn to leave."
"So your strategy was psychological warfare?" The sharpness in my voice is reflex — muscle memory from weeks of combat. "The bedroom. The study. The party. That was your version of a love letter?"
"I didn't know how else to make you look at me." He says it without flinching. "You hated me. You had every right. But when you were fighting me — when your jaw locked and your eyes went sharp and you looked like you could dismantle me with a sentence —" He stops. Swallows. "At least you saw me."
"That's the most deranged thing anyone has ever said to me."
"I know." He stands. Moves toward the chair in slow, deliberate steps — giving me time. Time to stop him, to say the smart thing, the safe thing. "I'm not good at this. I never was. I run. I hide behind the suit and the company and whatever wall I can build fast enough." He's in front of me now. Close enough that I have to tilt my head back. "But I'm tired of building walls. Especially against you."
"Tell me to go." His voice is barely a sound. "Say the word and I'm back in my room. We never mention this."
My mouth opens to say it. Every scar, every sleepless night, every morning I woke up alone and pregnant and terrified — all of it lines up behind the word go like soldiers waiting for orders.
But my hand — my hand moves on its own authority, rising to his jaw, palm finding stubble that scrapes against skin that hasn't touched a man in seven years.
His whole body shudders. Eyes closing, breath catching, a tremor running through him that starts where my fingers meet his face and doesn't stop.
"Don't go." It comes out barely above a whisper.
His mouth finds mine and the world falls off its axis. Not gentle — not even close. His hands grip my waist, my ribs, pulling me up from the chair and against him until there's nothing between us but cotton and seven years of terrible decisions. My fingers twist into his shirt, dragging him closer, and the sound he makes against my mouth — low, wrecked, the sound of a man who's been holding his breath since the day he left — undoes something structural behind my ribs.
He kisses me the way he confessed. Desperate, unguarded, like he's handing me every weapon I'd need to destroy him and hoping I won't. My back finds the wall. His hand slides into my hair, tilting my head, and when his mouth moves to my throat — to the exact spot he found seven years ago, the one that makes my spine dissolve — my nails dig into his shoulders hard enough to feel through the fabric.
"Mira." My name against my pulse. His breath ragged and hot. "Tell me to stop."
"If you stop now —" I pull his mouth back to mine, "— I will never forgive you."
His hands find the hem of my shirt and my skin finds his palms and I stop thinking about walls, about safety, about the thousand reasons this will wreck me.
There's only his mouth. His hands. The seven-year silence finally, finally breaking.